Salon.com: The free research movementSubmitted by Gary Van Domselaar; posted on Wednesday, July 02, 2003

``Michael Eisen, a biologist at UC-Berkeley, once spent a summer working as a play-by-play announcer for the minor league Columbia Mules, and when he talks about the sorry state of scientific publishing, he has a tendency to slip into an announcer's voice – quick, high-pitched, loud, intense.

``"It's ridiculous," Eisen said in this voice during a recent phone interview from Washington. "All these things we're so used to doing with information on the Internet, we're preventing clever entrepreneurial people from doing with works of science. The idea that a narrow profit motive would prevent the dissemination of this information – it's insane!"

``Eisen was in Washington to lend his support to a congressional effort he believes will make scientific publishing less insane and less ridiculous. Most scientific journals – such as Science, Nature or the New England Journal of Medicine – require researchers to turn over all rights to the reports selected for publication; the publications then charge institutions and individuals subscription fees to view these reports, a model that Eisen believes inhibits scientific progress. The approach is especially galling, Eisen says, when you consider that a great deal of the money that funds the research published in these journals comes from the federal government. The public is paying for science that it never gets to see, he says."